Tag Archive for 'Technology'

Page 2 of 7

B0rked

Published by Cody on April 8, 2008 in Personal and Technology. 1 Comment Tags: computer, Linux, Personal, problems, Technology, Vista, Windows.

This seems to be a theme with me. I get my computer to perfect working order, and then I decide to mess with it. Why? I don’t know. Some kind of weird compulsion, I guess. Whatever the case, I broke my computer. Again. Well, that’s not completely true. It was only partly broken. For a while, I’d been dual-booting Windows Vista and Windows XP. In case you think that’s odd, I’ll explain why: I use XP for games and Vista for everything else. Games played in Vista tend to have a lower framerate than when they’re played in XP, so I’m sticking with XP for my gaming needs. However, I prefer the Vista interface, which is why it’s my primary operating system.

I recently bought a 320 GB hard drive for my laptop and completely reinstalled everything from scratch. Everything was going great. Then I tried to install Linux. Again. Honestly, I can’t tell you why I have to try this time after time. Maybe I figure that I’ll like it this time, even though I haven’t the past 17 million times. At any rate, it shouldn’t have been a problem to resize one of my Windows partitions and try out a new distro of Linux I downloaded (the beta release of Kubuntu with KDE 4, ’cause the screenshots looked pretty). Turns out, it was a problem. Vista didn’t want to play nice, so I turned to GParted. That stalled out, so I booted up XP and tried out Partition Magic. That completely corrupted my Vista partition, making it impossible to boot into it. Luckily, XP still worked fine, so I was able to go into damage control. Damage control failed horribly (even when I turned to the Vista install disk’s repair function).

Luckily, I had, in my infinite wisdom, completely backed up Vista the night before. Since the only important information on XP was saved games and a few documents, I backed up a couple of folders on XP and wiped the hard drive clean. This time, I was going to reinstall everything and include Linux with it. But I abandoned Kubuntu and went with plain ol’ Ubuntu 7.10, which has worked for me in the past. In a couple of weeks, Ubuntu 8.04 will be out, so I’ll be able to easily upgrade.

The problem now is that I still need to copy over all my documents to the reinstalled Vista. And then I need to reinstall all my programs. And fix all my settings. And update everything…

I just did all of this a couple of weeks ago. It’s killing me.

iPhone action

Published by Cody on February 26, 2008 in Personal. 2 Comments Tags: Apple, cell, iPhone, Personal, phone, Technology.

I can’t believe I actually did it. I bought an iPhone. Updates (maybe pics) to follow. Sometime.

I’ll just say it right now: it’s awesome. Seriously. A very much needed upgrade from my old phone. It was a good ol’ phone, but its time had come. Now it’s off to be recycled, while I enjoy the awesomeness of my iPhone.

Firefox is a memory hog

Published by Cody on January 29, 2008 in Random and Technology. 3 Comments Tags: browser, Firefox, Internet, Internet-Explorer, memory, Mozilla, RAM, Random, Technology, Web.

The Firefox web browser is well-known for its memory leak problems. If you leave it open for a long enough time, it can take up as much as 200 MB of memory, even if you’re not actively using it. As an experiment, I opened up both Firefox and Internet Explorer and looked at the memory consumption of both when they had been open for a very short amount of time. The results are fairly interesting. Firefox was taking up almost five times as much RAM as Internet Explorer. And considering that Firefox was taking up more than 100 MB during my browsing session a short while earlier, it’s not inconceivable that the ratio would have gone up over time. Here’s the screenshot:

Granted, I may have a few extensions enabled on Firefox that IE doesn’t have, but that doesn’t help the memory leak problem. Or the incredibly slow startup time. Get working on this, Mozilla! Or I may be forced to switch to Opera.

Free right click!

Published by Cody on January 22, 2008 in Random. 2 Comments Tags: code, copy, copyright, Random, right click, select, Technology, Web, websites.

You know what I really hate? Those annoying scripts some people use on their websites to somehow prevent copyright infringement by either removing your right-click functionality and replacing it with a message along the lines of “No can click right! Copy is righted, please!” or forbidding you to copy without a message. Admittedly, the last is nicer and a bit surprising (I didn’t even know it was possible), but it’s still irritating. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to select text and copy it. Perhaps you’re quoting from a site, or maybe you just want to copy a hard-to-spell word or name to search for in Wikipedia or Google. I do the latter quite a lot, just because it’s easier to copy a name than try to remember how it’s spelled while in another browser tab.

But it’s not just the annoyances that make this practice silly. It’s the fact that it’s so easily subverted. Much like car ignitions and government encryption, you can get around the anti-right-click with a minimum of technical know-how. For most, simply using a keyboard shortcut to copy (Ctrl+C for Windows, Cmd+C for Mac) will get you the goods. But fancier scripts can prevent even that from working. In such a case, you can easily view the web page’s source code in any major browser and copy text from there. In Firefox, there are three ways to do this: right-click on the page and select “View Page Source”, select “Page Source” from the View menu, or simply press Ctrl+U (Cmd+U on Mac) on the keyboard. The process is pretty much the same in Internet Explorer. If you use Opera, I can’t help you. I’m not about to install another browser just to see how you can view the page source code. Tough noogies.

There may be ways to prevent viewing the source code entirely, but I’ve never heard of any such thing, and anyone who would be that paranoid about people copying their content probably doesn’t have a web site at all.

In short, preventing people from right-clicking or copying from a web page is irritating and pointless, especially when you consider that a determined thief could just use their eyes to copy content into a text document…alas, nature has once again bested technology. Perhaps one day, web site owners will be able to prevent even the eyes from copying their content. Won’t that be a rather ironic day…

Missing recent documents in Vista

Published by Cody on January 15, 2008 in Guides. 9 Comments Tags: guide, Home Premium, Microsoft, Office 2007, registry, Technology, Vista, Windows.

This may be an unusual problem, but I figured I’d post a how-to just in case. Anyways, ever since I installed Microsoft Office 2007 on my copy of Windows Vista Home Premium I have been unable to view recent documents. Normally, there’s a list of documents you’ve opened that shows up in a few places in Windows, including all the Office programs. For me, it has always been grayed out. Why? Apparently, my administrator (a.k.a. me) disallowed recent document history using group policy. Now, since I had done no such thing, it must have been something Windows did on its own. Or something. My copy of Windows is really screwed up.

Anyways, I know all about group policy. On any other version of Windows, you could simply go to your Start men, and type “gpedit.msc” (no quotes) in the Run box. Here’s a short tutorial for this on Windows XP and earlier. It should also work on Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Unfortunately, you can’t use gpedit.msc to edit group policy on Vista Home Basic or Home Premium. Instead, you have to directly edit the registry. Don’t panic! I’ll guide you through. But always be sure to make a backup before editing the registry. This is easily done by clicking File>Export… in the Registry Editor and selecting “All” at the bottom of the screen that comes up. Do it now. Do it.

Go ahead and open up the Registry Editor by typing “regedit” (no quotes) in your Start menu search box and pressing enter. Find the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (HKCU stands for HKEY_CURRENT_USER.) Double-click on the value inside the key labeled “NoRecentDocsHistory”. Change the 1 to 0. If it’s already 0, you don’t even need this tutorial and have wasted five minutes of your life. Way to go.

Anyways, now that you’ve edited this value, you should be able to view recent documents in Office programs and Windows itself. At the very least, you can actually edit the recent documents options in Windows and Office. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone. Maybe I just have strange computer problems that never show up for anyone else… And if I was too technical or confusing in this guide, feel free to leave me a comment.

Finally, if you’re interested in editing more group policy stuff in Vista Home Basic or Home Premium, I suggest downloading this Excel spreadsheet from Microsoft, which lists all the group policy settings and their corresponding registry keys. Very useful, especially without gpedit.msc (which is basically an easier to use interface for these particular registry keys). Or you could spring for Vista Ultimate.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Apr
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31